Sometime soon, you'll likely have something to print—and there's no guarantee you'll be at your home or office when the need strikes. You could make a reminder for yourself to print that e-mail or document the next time you're at your Mac or PC, or you could harness the power of the cloud to remove those traditional workplace boundaries and bring the printer to you.

Cloud printing has been around for a few years now, and it's actually very easy to set up. Google is the reigning champ in this space, with a product aptly named Cloud Print. With a few minutes of setup, you can have your Android, iPhone, Mac, or PC printing to printers in faraway places—even FedEx offices—from wherever and whenever you wish.

But what about AirPrint? Apple's wireless printing platform, first released in 2010 with iOS 4.2, is unfortunately limited to local networks. Even when connected to a home or office network over VPN, networked AirPrint-capable printers simply fail to identify. Perhaps, eventually, that will change. For now, Google is running the show.

Cloud Print can be set up in one of two ways. A number of manufacturers, including HP, Kodak, Epson, and Canon, already sell cloud-ready printers that "connect directly to the web and don't require a PC to set up." But what if you have a so-called "classic" printer, one that can't go online? You can still set that up too.

Because Cloud Print was initially conceived for use with Chrome OS, the setup process is handled entirely in Google's Chrome browser. To enable Cloud Print, head over to Chrome's Settings page, and select "Under the Hood." From there, you should see the option to enable Cloud Print from the bottom of the page.

Setting up Cloud Print requires you to go under the hood.

The process is relatively painless from here. If you already have a printer installed in Windows or OS X, Cloud Print is smart enough to identify the device and prepare it for remote printing. You don't even need to keep Chrome open. A helper process runs in the background and listens for new print jobs. The only caveat, of course, is that both the printer and computer must remain on for cloud printing to work.

From here, you're probably going to want to, you know, print something. If you're using Chrome on any other Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, this too is easy. Any Chrome installation synced to your Google account has the ability to print to your cloud printers. Or, if a friend or coworker has an existing Cloud Print setup, they can share their cloud-enabled printer with you too. This can be useful in small business or team scenarios where multiple people can be given access to a shared printer in a remote location that is managed by someone else.

To print, simply select the Cloud Print option from Chrome's print page dialog. Doing so will open a browser pop-up that lists all of your cloud-enabled printers, in addition to any other printers that friends or co-workers have shared with your Google address.

Of course, you're not just limited to printing from Chrome (though this is the simplest way to get going). OS X users can use a third-party app called Cloud Printer to print a variety of documents from a local machine—and, with a few extra steps, can set up Cloud Printer to act as a virtual printer in any Mac app. Windows users can download a similar app called Paperless Printer. Both are free.

Mobile use is, admittedly, a little more difficult. Unlike a desktop OS, mobile applications on Android and iOS require printer support to be included on a per-application basis, and every implementation is a little different. In other words, you won't necessarily be able to use Cloud Print with every application that also supports printing.

On Android, you'll be able to print from Google's mobile Chrome browser, for example, or within the native Google Docs app. There are also other capable apps listed on Google's website, as well as on the Play store. On iOS, however, native options are slim. Google says that the in-browser versions of its mobile apps support Cloud Print, and some websites apparently feature a Cloud Print button. However, perhaps the best approach is to use an alternative to remote printing all together. An app available for Windows and OS X called WePrint can monitor an e-mail address for new file attachements and print them using a local printer when received. Or, if you're a Dropbox user on OS X and feel more comfortable setting things up yourself, you can use Automator to automatically print any file synced to a local Dropbox folder.

It's not quite the same as having native print support in a given application, but it beats not being able to print at all.

15 Reader Comments

I wish this worked for me. I used it for about a week on my home server (running Win7) to print to my wireless printer (doesn't support cloud print natively). All the sudden, it just quit working. I could see online that I had documents in my print queue, but they never made it to the server to be printed. I tried manually restarting Chrome, reinstalling it, but nothing has worked ever since.

I'll have to try again, since it's probably been updated since then. Being able to print directly from my tablet/phone was quite useful.

I tried Cloud Print before, but I don't really see the value of it. Why would I want to print something when away from home and unable to pick up the printout? If I'm at home, the printer's already shared over the network so Cloud Print doesn't add anything there.

I tried Cloud Print before, but I don't really see the value of it. Why would I want to print something when away from home and unable to pick up the printout? If I'm at home, the printer's already shared over the network so Cloud Print doesn't add anything there.

Mostly I'd use it for printing off things that I want to get back to when I'm home and figure I won't remember unless I take care of now.

For instance when I get that email from my auto insurance company telling me to download and print off the renewal cards for my policy, while I'm at work. Or a co-worker shares a nice recipe with me. Or I have a bunch of items to add to my shopping list...

I wish this worked for me. I used it for about a week on my home server (running Win7) to print to my wireless printer (doesn't support cloud print natively). All the sudden, it just quit working. I could see online that I had documents in my print queue, but they never made it to the server to be printed. I tried manually restarting Chrome, reinstalling it, but nothing has worked ever since.

I'll have to try again, since it's probably been updated since then. Being able to print directly from my tablet/phone was quite useful.

I had this issue, and still do. The kicker for me was one day last week I logged in as administrator on my Win7 machine and the entire queue printed, weeks after they were useful to me. Apparently it only works on my PC on the original admin account that I used to install the Brother laser printer. The account it does not work on was originally simply a user account that I later made admin because the f*cked up world of windows software pretty much requires you be an admin unless all you do is use the Office Suite and IE to surf.

I tried Cloud Print before, but I don't really see the value of it. Why would I want to print something when away from home and unable to pick up the printout? If I'm at home, the printer's already shared over the network so Cloud Print doesn't add anything there.

One more step to not needing a traditional desktop computer. There are new printers that support cloud print and air print out of the box.

I tried Cloud Print before, but I don't really see the value of it. Why would I want to print something when away from home and unable to pick up the printout? If I'm at home, the printer's already shared over the network so Cloud Print doesn't add anything there.

One more step to not needing a traditional desktop computer. There are new printers that support cloud print and air print out of the box.

I think the bigger question here reflects the details of how Cloud Print is set up.The basic problem is that we have both (a) I don't want any random computer on the internet able to print on my printer. That's basically a replication of the fax spam epidemic of the 80s and early 90s. But I ALSO (b) Don't want to have to authenticate every time I print.

Assume that both these issues could be resolved. Then it's certainly occasionally convenient to be able to print to any nearby printer; for example at a friend's house you realize you'd like a hard copy of a map from your phone, or at a hotel you'd like to print out a boarding pass.

IMHO the big disappointment with Cloud Print is that it doesn't seem to involve any great new leap forward in authentication technology --- it only works with the (undoubtedly tiny) set of printers you already have access to (the workgroup scenario) or with perhaps commercial printers (the FedEx/Kinkos scenario) where you have to authenticate for each print job. It doesn't even seem to have a good solution for what is likely the most common of the problems I gave above --- the "I want to print a boarding pass on the hotel printer" scenario.

The thing is, shipping a printing job over the internet is technically no big deal and most people (rightly) don't give a damn about it. A generalized authentication scheme IS a big deal --- and is not what we have here. Don't be surprised if FaceBook (usually one step ahead of Google when it comes to actually considering how to make technology useful as opposed to just working) introduce FacePrint, which includes automatic remote printing authentication for your Facebook Friends, and authentication (via your FaceBook ID) plus credit card charging for your hotel printer.

I tried Cloud Print before, but I don't really see the value of it. Why would I want to print something when away from home and unable to pick up the printout? If I'm at home, the printer's already shared over the network so Cloud Print doesn't add anything there.

Cloud Print isn't about remote printing, it's about print drivers. Printing from every device even though print drivers weren't developed for its OS.